Media News is momentarily discontinued.

Educators interested in “flipping” their classroom (that is, providing
traditional lecture material for review at home and problem-solving
exercises in the classroom) now have two more options to provide core
content with a minimum of effort. Yesterday TED announced TED-Ed, a service designed to “capture and
amplify the voice of the world’s greatest teachers.” In addition to
hosting the videos, TED-Ed works with educators to review lessons and
ensure they are less than 10 minutes. After the educator records and
uploads the audio/video, TED-Ed works with animators to create story
reels for each lesson, reports say. Also this week, Khan Academyannounced a new iPad app. In a shot across
the bow of traditional textbook publishers, this repackaging of existing
Khan Academy content provides downloaded videos, subtitles, and progress
tracking (requires a khanacademy.org account.) Faculty are likely to struggle finding their place in this new paradigm.
With the increasing availability of lecture content, many will need to
bring more value to the educational experience in other ways. Educators
can be content creators, content consumers, or both, depending on the
needs of their students. But we are likely to see a smaller number of
high-profile faculty providing content to a larger audience than in the
past.

The BBC has suffered a
sophisticated cyber-attack following a campaign by Iranian authorities
against its Persian service, director-general Mark Thompson said on
Wednesday. Thompson also reported attempts to jam satellite feeds of the British
Broadcasting Corporation services into Iran and to swamp its London
phone lines with automated calls. In extracts from a speech he will make later on Wednesday, Thompson
stopped short of explicitly accusing Tehran of being behind the
cyber-attack, but he described the coincidence of the attacks as
"self-evidently suspicious". Last month, Thompson accused Iranian authorities of arresting and
threatening the families of BBC journalists to force them to quit the
Persian news service. "It now looks as if those who seek to disrupt or block BBC Persian may
be widening their tactics," he said in the extracts of his speech, which
the BBC released in advance. BBC Persian staff provide Farsi-language TV, radio and online services.
Few Western journalists are permitted to work in Iran where the hardline
Islamic government views much of the foreign media with suspicion.
The BBC's TV service has often been jammed and is only available to
owners of illegal satellite receivers. All BBC Persian service staff work outside Iran, and Thompson has
accused Tehran authorities of instead arresting and intimidating their
relatives who still live inside the country.

In light of the worldwide spotlight on the non-profit organization
Invisible Children and its viral YouTube video Kony 2012, Al Jazeera
English has launched “Uganda Speaks,” an initiative to track down the
voices of the people who have largely been missing from the debates
regarding the viral video and its organizers. Namely, Ugandans
themselves. Al Jazeera’s online platform for Uganda Speaks features an
interactive map showing the different locations where views are
filtering in from, as well as highlights the crowd-sourced, time-stamped
views — cited as “reports” — on a stream. At the time of writing, the majority of reports were coming from
Kampala, the largest city and capital of Uganda. “It is now too little
too late,” “Skeptical about Kony 2012,” “African Forces Should Stop
Kony” and “Hysteria” were just some of the headlines on the stream.
Alongside Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumir’s YouTube video stating
her response to Kony 2012, Al Jazeera’s initiative is one of the few
drawing attention to Ugandan opinions. Meanwhile, Invisible Children released a video yesterday defending its
organization and the Kony 2012 campaign.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that after 244 years, dozens
of editions and more than 7m sets sold, no new editions will be put to
paper. The 32 volumes of the 2010 installment, it turns out, were the
last. Future editions will live exclusively online. For some readers the news will provoke malaise at the wayward course of
this misguided age. Others will wonder, in the era of Wikipedia, what
took the dinosaur so long to die. Neither view quite captures the
company or the crossroads. Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, suggested that
the encyclopedia was already something of a relic within the company
itself, which has long since moved its main business away from its
trademark publication and into online educational tools. The company has changed from a reference provider to an instructional
solutions provider," Cauz said. He projects that only 15 percent of the
company's revenue this year will come from its namesake publication,
mostly through subscriptions and app purchases. "The vast majority" of
the remaining 85 percent of revenue is expected to come from educational
products and services, said Cauz, who declined to provide dollar amounts
but said the company was profitable. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, is owned by the Swiss banking magnate
Jacqui Safra. The company's websites, which include Merriam-Webster
dictionaries, attracted more than 450 million users over the course of
2011, according to internal numbers.

Four French media groups, Amaury Medias, FigaroMedias, Lagardere
Publicite and TF1 Publicite, have launched AdMediaPremium, a private
platform to sell the unsold advertising space on their websites, an
article on Le Figaro reported. As the article explains, the aim of this private marketplace is to
restore the value of all the advertising on the media companies'
websites through joining forces and audience. The four groups in fact
have together an audience of 22 million unique visitors per month and a
stock of 3 billion web printing. The advertising rates on websites vary, the article continued to
explain. The homepages displays “super premium” advertising, usually
sold at high rates directly by the media group, while ads on the other
pages, progressively displayed in less visible spaces of the site, have
lower rates and are sold by external brokers who sell them to
advertisers amongst millions of other unspecified sites. For this reason
this huge inventory loses value, the article explains. Through AdMediaPremium, the four media groups will regain control and
value of the entire advertising on the websites putting together these
“haute couture” and “ready-to-wear” different advert categories. According to the figures released by OJD (Office de Justification de la
Diffusion) some of the titles which belong to the four media groups,
such as Lequipe.fr, LeFigaro.fr and Leparisien.fr, are among the sites
with the highest traffic in France.

Mexico's Senate has approved constitutional changes that would make all
attacks on journalists a federal crime. The amendments endorsed by the Senate and earlier by the House of
Deputies would have the federal Attorney General's Office investigates
all crimes against news workers. The changes won't take effect unless they are approved by at least 17 of
Mexico's 31 state legislatures and are then signed by the president.
Attacks on Mexican journalists generally go unprosecuted. There is disagreement on the number of journalist killings. Mexico's
national human rights commission says 74 were slain from 2000 to 2011.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says 51 were killed
in that time.